Tayeb Salih's writing is drawn from his experience of communal village life that is centered on people and their complex relationships. "At various levels and with varying degrees of psychoanalytic emphasis, he deals with themes of reality and illusion, the cultural dissonance between the West and the exotic orient, the harmony and conflict of brotherhood, and the individual's responsibility to find a fusion between his or her contradictions" . It can be said that the motifs of his books are derived from his Islamic background and his experience of modern Africa, both pre- and post-colonial. In 1966, Salih published his novel Mawsim al-Hijrah ilâ al-Shamâl , the one for which he is best known. It was first published in the Beirut journal Hiwâr. The main concern of the novel is with the impact of British colonialism and European modernity on rural African societies in general and Sudanese culture and identity in particular. His novel reflects the conflicts of modern Sudan and depicts the brutal history of European colonialism as shaping the reality of contemporary Sudanese society.. Mawsim al-Hijrah ilâ al-Shamâl is a story told to an unspecified audience of the “traveled man,” the African who has returned from schooling abroad by an unnamed narrator. The narrator returns to his Sudanese village of Wad Hamid on the Nile in the 1950s after writing a phD thesis on ‘the life of an obscure English poet’. Mustafa Sa'eed, the main protagonist of the novel, is a child of British colonialism, and a fruit of colonial education. He is also a monstrous product of his time. Mawsim al-Hijrah ilâ al-Shamâl is considered to be an important turning point in the development of postcolonial narratives that focus on the encounter between East and West. Damascus-based Arab Literary Academy named it one of the best novels in Arabic of the twentieth century. The novel was banned in Salih's native Sudan for several years despite the fact that it won him prominence and fame worldwide. The novel was adapted into a theater production in Israel. Urs' al-Zayn is a comic novella published in 1969 centering on the unlikely nuptials of the town eccentric Zein. Tall and odd-looking, with just two teeth in his mouth, Zein has made a reputation for himself as the man who falls in love over and over with girls who promptly marry other men- to the point where mothers seek him out in hopes that he will draw the eye of available suitors to their eligible daughters. "The Wedding of Zein" was made into a drama in Libya and won Kuwaiti filmmaker Khalid Siddiq an award in the Cannes Festival in the late 1970s.
In 1998 a group of Salih's friends formed a committee to honour him, and collected $20,000 for his personal use. He chose to use the money to establish the Tayeb Salih Book Prize for novelistic creativity. The Board of Trustees of the Abdelkarim Mirghani Cultural Centre established a committee of writers and academics to select the prize winners, who are announced each year on 21 October; the winning titles are then published by Abdelkarim Mirghani Cultural Centre. The first prize was awarded in 2003. In 2008, Abdelkarim Mirghani Cultural Centre created the Tayeb Salih Short Story Writing Prize for Youth. In 2010, shortly after Salih's death, Zain Sudan created the Al-Tayeb Salih Prize for Creative Writing. The competition includes short stories, poetry and novels and is open to writers from all over the world.
